Grow Your Children’s Activity Business – Building Personal Connections with Schools & Nurseries

Looking to grow your children’s activity business? As children’s activity providers, combining our services with formal education is a great way to grow our children’s activity business businesses with confidence and have a bigger impact on children’s lives.

But how do we sell to schools?  What is the best way to contact them? Will they really want our services right now?  Do schools and nurseries even respond to emails?

The key here is to ensure that our initial communication is relevant, useful and valuable in order to compel a school or nursery to respond.

A highly relevant email will be personalised.  Not just with the name of the key decision maker but also with the name of the school or nursery itself.  A relevant email may also contain an offer that’s themed for the time of year or content that refers to current events.

A useful email will educate and speak to our reader – a subject coordinator or member of the senior leadership team – with authority.  Communicating the problem you are solving with a quote or statistic from an official publication is one way to do this.

A valuable email won’t try to sell ANYTHING to schools (yet).  It’ll ideally offer to give the school or nursery a valuable experience of working with you for free instead.  So you can demonstrate the impact and outcomes you can deliver before getting the school’s buy-in.

So forget mass generic emails that will only get deleted by the school receptionist, forget flashy html templates that won’t get opened and forget those flyers that will end up in the bin…because the future of communication with schools and nurseries is PERSONAL.

Here are some tips for building that all important personal connection with schools, even in your initial communication with them:

1. Do your research.  Find the name of a key decision maker within the school.  If you can’t find the name of the relevant subject coordinator, you’ll ALWAYS be able to find the name of the headteacher on the school website.
2. Personalise the email in the subject line as well as in the main body of text.  Go one step further and personalise the name of the school or nursery in your email too.
3. Use your email signature to build trust.  This is where headshots go a long way.  You want the school staff to make the connection between the person emailing them and the person visiting the school for the first time.

For more tips about approaching schools and nurseries with confidence and to learn how to structure your email to maximise your chances of getting a response, go to www.ceryskeneally.com to download your free workbook.

Cerys Keneally is passionate about helping children’s activity providers to get more work with schools & nurseries, so they can grow their children’s activity business with confidence and have a bigger impact on children’s lives.  You can usually find her hanging out in the Primary Activity Provider Business Club, a free community for children’s activity providers who are making a difference in children’s lives at www.facebook.com/groups/primaryactivityproviderbusinessclub